Unknown Armies, Second Edition wrote:
Somewhere out there is someone who had loving parents, watched clouds on a summer's day, fell in love, lost a friend, is kind to small animals, and knows how to say 'please' and 'thank you,' and yet somehow the two of you are going to end up in a dirty little room with one knife between you and you are going to have to kill that human being.
It’s a terrible thing. Not just because he’s come to the same realization and wants to survive just as much as you do, meaning he’s going to try and puncture your internal organs to set off a cascading trauma effect that ends with you voiding your bowels, dying alone and removed from everything you've ever loved. No, it’s a terrible thing because somewhere along the way you could have made a different choice. You could have avoided that knife, that room, and maybe even found some kind of common ground between the two of you. Or at least, you might have divvied up some turf and left each other alone. That would've been a lot smarter, wouldn’t it? Even dogs are smart enough to do that. Now you’re staring into the eyes of a fellow human and in a couple minutes one of you is going to be vomiting to the rhythm of a fading heartbeat. The survivor is going to remember this night for the rest of his or her life.
Objective, static alignment might just be one of the contributing factors to a systemic disregard for others observed in some characters. How violence and death are treated by systems often seems correlated with how theses systems treat morality and personhood.